IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 505

England was slow to follow Spain into the Americas. Richard Hakluyt, a geographer and clergyman, argued that colonies would provide a base for attacking Spanish shipping, a market for English cloth and a home for the poor. In 1584 Queen Elizabeth I granted Walter Raleigh a charter to explore and settle lands in North America that were not held by a Christian prince. Raleigh, who never sailed there himself, financed an expedition that same year.

The ships, commanded by Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe, took a southerly route by way of the West Indies and reached the coast of what is now North Carolina in July. They entered the shallow waters behind the Outer Banks and spent some weeks exploring Roanoke Island, whose soil and grapes impressed them. Contacts with local Algonquian speakers were initially friendly. Two men, Manteo and Wanchese, agreed to sail to England, where they were presented at court and where Thomas Harriot, a mathematician in Raleigh's household, began to learn their language. Barlowe's account of the voyage, published by Hakluyt, encouraged further investment.

A second expedition under Ralph Lane left England in 1585 with about a hundred men, most of them soldiers, and established a fort and houses on the northern end of Roanoke Island. John White, an artist, and Harriot both came to record the landscape, plants and people. The colony was badly prepared for a year in a strange country, however. Its supplies depended on ships from England, and its demands on the local population for food rapidly turned friendship into hostility. When Sir Francis Drake called at the island in June 1586, the exhausted settlers abandoned the site and sailed home with him. A relief fleet under Sir Richard Grenville arrived soon afterwards, found the island deserted, and left fifteen men behind to hold the English claim.

A third attempt was made in 1587, this time planned as a settlement of families rather than a garrison. White was appointed governor, and about 115 colonists set out, among them women and children. The intention was to establish the main settlement on Chesapeake Bay, with Roanoke used only as a stopping point. Instead the fleet's master, a privateer named Simon Fernandes, kept the settlers at Roanoke rather than carrying them north. Before the ships left, Manteo was baptised, and on 18 August 1587 White's daughter Eleanor gave birth to a girl, Virginia Dare, the first English child born in North America.

The colonists were short of supplies, and at their request White sailed back to England for more. He reached home in November 1587 to find the country preparing for war with Spain, and every seaworthy vessel was being kept for the defence of the realm. White's own attempt to return in 1588 was abandoned after the ships' captains turned to privateering instead. Raleigh, who had spent a fortune on the venture, was by then losing interest, and it was not until August 1590 that White finally reached Roanoke again, three years after leaving it.

What he found there was an empty settlement. The houses had been taken down rather than destroyed, which suggested that the colonists had left in an orderly fashion. White had agreed beforehand that if the settlers moved they would carve the name of their destination somewhere visible, and that if they were forced out by attack they would add a cross. On a post he saw the letters CROATOAN carved without any cross; his men found CRO on a tree nearby, and a few objects that had belonged to the colony.

Croatoan was the name the English used for the island now called Hatteras, to the south, and for the people who lived there. Manteo's own community was on that island, and his friendship with the English made it a plausible refuge. With the weather worsening and supplies running low, White could not cross to search, and he returned to England for good. His account has been analysed ever since. When the English founded Jamestown in 1607, settlers were told of Europeans living among neighbouring peoples, but no reliable contact with survivors was ever established.

The fate of the colonists has attracted speculation for four centuries. The most widely accepted explanation is that they divided, with some joining the Croatoan and other Algonquian communities and gradually being absorbed into them. Others suggest that they moved inland, or that they were killed by hostile groups. There is some archaeological support for the first theory. Excavations on Hatteras Island, notably at a site called Cape Creek, have produced European objects that could date from the period, while a site in Bertie County excavated from 2012 onward has yielded similarly ambiguous traces.

None of this amounts to proof, and the difficulties are considerable. No human remains have been identified as those of the colonists; the coastal landscape has shifted; and the small, scattered communities of the sixteenth century are hard to locate. Some families in eastern North Carolina have long claimed descent from the settlers, and the surnames involved sometimes match those recorded in 1587. Genetic studies have been proposed, but descent over so many generations is difficult to demonstrate. The Lost Colony remains a story with an unanswered question at its centre, which may be why it has lasted so long.

The ocean's surface is not still. Winds blowing across it push the upper few metres of water, and because the planet rotates, this movement is deflected to the right in the northern hemisphere and to the left in the southern. The result is a pattern of vast, slow circular flows, or gyres, five of which dominate the subtropical oceans. A gyre is really a ring of currents: the Gulf Stream and its North Atlantic companions form one, while the North Pacific gyre is bounded by the Kuroshio, the California Current and their equatorial counterparts. Water inside the ring rotates gently and, in the centre, converges.

Anything that floats and is not removed on the way will eventually be carried by these currents. Every year, several million tonnes of plastic are thought to enter the sea from rivers, coastlines, fishing gear and shipping. Most of it is less dense than seawater, so it stays near the surface, where sunlight and wave action slowly break it into smaller and smaller fragments. A plastic bottle that would survive for centuries in a landfill is ground down at sea into particles the size of a grain of rice, but it does not disappear. Fishing gear is a particular concern: ropes and nets lost at sea are both large and durable, and they continue to trap animals as they drift.

"Garbage patch" is a misleading name. The best-known of these accumulations, in the North Pacific, was described in the 1990s and is often pictured as a floating island of bottles and bags. In reality the debris is spread over a vast area at very low density. A boat crossing it sees mostly clear blue water, and a surface net may collect only a scattering of fragments for every hour it is towed. Researchers sometimes describe it as a soup rather than a patch. The concentration of plastic there is far higher than elsewhere in the ocean, but the area involved is enormous, and its edges shift from season to season.

The North Pacific accumulation became public knowledge largely through an accident. In 1997 an American yachtsman, Charles Moore, was sailing home across the Pacific after a race when he found himself surrounded by floating debris for days. He went on to found a research organisation and to draw attention to the phenomenon. Scientific records, however, show that plastic had been sampled in the North Atlantic from the 1980s onwards by researchers working on student training ships. Their samples provided the first long record of plastic in that ocean. The instruments used are simple: fine-mesh nets towed at the surface, and the fragments are then counted and weighed in a laboratory.

Why should debris gather in particular places? The answer lies in the convergence at the centre of a gyre. Floating objects drift with the currents that carry them, and these flows slowly deliver material towards the middle of the ring, where the water is relatively calm. Once there, debris can circulate for decades. Oceanographers test such predictions with the help of thousands of drifting buoys, deployed by weather agencies to measure surface currents. When model simulations of ocean circulation are driven by these observations, floating material released around the world's coasts concentrates within a few years into the same few regions where researchers find plastic.

In the water, plastic does not stay in one piece. Sunlight weakens it, waves and sand grind it, and organisms grow on its surface. Much of the material in the gyres is already microscopic. Microplastics, as these fragments are called, are now found in sea ice, on remote beaches and in the digestive tracts of fish, seabirds and turtles. The physical harm is obvious in some cases: animals become entangled in fishing nets and packing loops, and whales and birds swallow items that block their stomachs. The consequences of repeated exposure to tiny particles are far less clear, and are an active area of research.

One of the most puzzling features of ocean plastic is how little of it is found floating. Estimates of the quantity entering the sea each year are in the millions of tonnes, yet scientific surveys count only a small fraction of that at the surface. Where the rest goes is uncertain. A large part probably washes back onto coasts or remains in the machinery of the ocean, tangled in seaweed or buried in sediment. Some is colonised by algae and barnacles, which add weight; the particles sink, and may be carried into deep water by the great conveyor of currents driven by differences in temperature and salinity. Any of these processes would help to explain the discrepancy, and no single one is likely to account for all of it.

Several organisations now attempt to remove plastic from the sea. The best known, founded by the Dutch inventor Boyan Slat, tows long floating barriers behind two vessels to gather debris from the surface, and early trials have shown that the equipment can catch material without harming most marine life. Yet the engineering is expensive and can never recover particles too small for a net, and the amounts collected are small compared with the flow entering from rivers. Collecting debris also produces waste of its own, since the material must be landed, sorted and disposed of. Most specialists therefore argue that clearing the gyres is a poor substitute for stopping plastic at source, by improving waste collection, reducing unnecessary packaging and redesigning products so that they can be reused.

Online shopping has made the return of goods routine. Buying clothes without trying them on guarantees that a proportion of every order will be sent back, and industry surveys commonly put the figure for garments bought online at between a fifth and a third of all items, with rates higher still in countries where returning goods has traditionally cost the customer nothing. Retailers have built the cost into their prices, and shoppers have come to treat free returns as part of the service. In recent years, however, several large chains have begun to charge a small fee, usually a few pounds or euros, when an order is sent back.

Retail economists tend to defend such charges. Handling a return is not cheap: someone must receive the parcel, inspect the item, decide whether it can be sold again, and then repack it or send it for recycling. Because these costs are spread across all customers, including those who never return anything, a free-returns policy amounts to a subsidy paid by careful shoppers to impulsive ones. A charge, on this view, simply makes the cost of a decision visible to the person making it.

Logistics specialists add that the expense is easily underestimated. Transport is only part of it; most of the money goes on the labour of inspection and repacking, and on the loss of value when an item cannot be sold as new. Warehouses that process thousands of parcels a day employ staff whose main task is exactly this. A returned garment may also travel further than it did on its first journey, since it must be carried back to a warehouse and then out again to a second customer.

Environmental groups frame the issue differently. Every return means another van journey, another plastic bag and another layer of wrapping. Journalists in several countries have filmed usable returned goods being destroyed. Destroying an item is sometimes cheaper than storing it or selling it again, and campaigners argue that retailers should be required to report how much they throw away. Some retailers have presented return fees as a way of cutting waste. Yet the evidence that charges reduce the environmental burden is thin: a customer who keeps an ill-fitting jacket and never wears it has hardly helped.

Consumer advocates raise a different objection. Distance selling gives the shopper no chance to inspect the goods, which is precisely why the law grants a right to cancel within a short period — fourteen days in Britain and across the European Union. A fee does not remove that right, but it makes exercising it cost money, and advocates accept that it can act as a deterrent to the merely indecisive. Their concern is that charges fall hardest on people who cannot easily reach a shop. For a customer in a rural area without a car, ordering several sizes may be the only practical way to obtain clothes that fit.

Retailers, meanwhile, have noticed that a charge changes behaviour. The practice of ordering several sizes or colours with the intention of keeping one, known in the trade as bracketing, becomes less attractive when every parcel sent back carries a price. Several chains that introduced fees have reported that they reduce the volume of parcels sent back, though they rarely publish figures, and it is hard to separate the effect of the fee from other changes, such as tighter stock control or a general shift in shopping habits.

There are alternatives, and some of them appear to work. Better size information — accurate measurements, photographs on models of different heights, and reviews that warn when a garment runs small — reduces returns at least as effectively as a fee, and does so without penalising anyone. Virtual fitting tools have been used by some brands with reported success. Making it easy to return goods to a physical shop, where they can be resold quickly, is another route, though it depends on having shops. Some companies now offer free returns to a store but charge for collection from home.

My own view is that a modest and clearly explained charge is defensible. It makes visible a cost that was previously hidden, and it discourages the careless bulk-ordering that clogs warehouses. But three conditions matter. The charge should be small enough to act as a nudge rather than a barrier. It should be waived without argument when goods are faulty or not as described. And it should not be dressed up as environmental policy, since its main purpose is to protect the retailer's margin. The greenest choice remains buying less and keeping it longer.

What the debate reveals is that free returns were never really free; the question is who should pay. A fee is a crude instrument, and it is a poor substitute for the information that would let customers order the right thing in the first place. Used honestly and modestly, however, it may be a reasonable price for a convenience that shoppers have come to expect.